


Standing, Still

by orphan_account



Series: Standing Verse [2]
Category: AFI
Genre: Adultery, Cheating, DU era, Decemberunderground, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, New Year's Eve, mentally unstable Davey, my take on canon, the Standing universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 22:04:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3225122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade’s never been as good a liar as Davey is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first chunk I wrote in the Standing verse. Weirdly enough, it's one of few DU era fics I've ever written, even though DU era fascinates me. I feel like I said all I ever need to say about it in this story. This whole thing is miserable, but this segment might be the most miserable, depending upon who you talk to. I hope you like it.

April 2006

Leaving the apartment is easy. After all, she sleeps sounder than Jade ever has, sounder than Davey ever will. Jade’s still used to hopping over noisy floorboards to prevent any squeaks that will possibly wake Davey, but his prudence is wasted as he stands motionless on the top step, his breath terrified and held fast. She remains ever sleeping, however, a comma of quiet in the moonlit sheet, grey and breathing a slow, steady in and out. 

The drive over, across the usually ever-lighted, tawdry and glittering Sunset Blvd. is peculiarly colorless, parched and drained. It’s only after Jade’s been in the car awhile, turning into Davey’s driveway, that the world starts to gain color again. It’s been this way for awhile now. He lets himself into Davey’s apartment; he never took the key off his key ring, not even when he swore to himself it was over in every sense of the word. Jade’s never been as good a liar as Davey is. 

He could have fooled anyone, though, with the way he finds himself standing in Davey’s kitchen, pouring a glass of water with shaking hands before he prepares himself for the trip upstairs, where a light is on and filtering weakly into the first floor like coffee brewed with too much water, not enough grounds. It’s dark in Davey’s kitchen, and Jade’s staring so intently at the stainless steel sink-head reflecting the moon that he misses the sounds of footsteps on the stairs. 

Davey’s already behind him as he’s turning around, bewildered and stunned silent, the half empty glass of tap water nearly slipping from his hands and shattering across the floor into powder like a million unalterable mistakes. Davey saves the glass from this unsavory demise, however, and takes it from Jade’s hand before setting it on the counter. Their fingers burn as they touch, like things rough and sweet and whispered in the dark. Without exchanging any words, Davey and Jade are kissing, their bodies shuffling together fitfully like two halves of a well-worn deck of cards. 

Jade stands still and lets it happen. 

Every time, he tells himself that this isn’t hurting anyone, that she doesn’t know and Davey’s just as fucked up as he is. The overwhelming, visceral ache in his chest tells him otherwise though, sings a hundred songs about guilt and selfishness and really, if he admits it, self sabotage, too. It might not be hurting her (yet) and it might not be hurting Davey (lie) but it’s inarguably killing Jade. 

Still, he cannot fucking stop, can’t stop his dick from stirring against the warm hollow of Davey’s familiar hip, can’t stop his own voice from cracking as it mumbles a pathetic “ _please,_ ” into the rough, uneven stretch of Davey’s throat. They kiss halfway up the stairs, which they don’t even finish climbing before Davey falls on top of him in a graceless mess of desperate limbs and hissing breath. It doesn’t matter, the stairs are as good a place as any for Davey to roll Jade’s thin, pliant body onto his stomach, roughly pull his jeans down off his ass, spit in his palm, and fuck him bloody with his left hand up to the third knuckle in Jade’s wincing mouth. 

He’s done it in the bed twice, on the bedroom floor once, and against the kitchen counter another time. And that is just this month. Jade comes panting and drooling and groaning every time, willing and ready to admit that this was all he really wanted, all along, and things fell apart because of him. His fault. He was the one who ran. 

After that there are the close, sweaty moments of surreal suspension, as Jade’s body shivers and lurches from the nervy pain and pleasure of it all. He feels stretched out and broken like the crinkled metal of a shotgun shell, raw, skinned, but still full and burning where Davey inside of him. 

But finally, lingeringly, there’s the crash. The empty, cavernous ache in his chest as Davey slides from the torn warmth of his body, tucking himself back into his pants and smoothing the chaos out of his hair, scraping himself up from the depraved ruins they’ve just been reduced to, to climb atop his soapbox of hurt once again. There’s Davey standing upright, standing still, with Jade sprawled and half naked and decomposing on the floor. There’s the highhorse, the removed, cold tundra forming between them. 

Jade is left on all fours to swallow his pride again, and again, and again. 

Jade will drive home then, smelling like blood and sweat and shit and Davey’s new vanilla perfume. And Jade will tell himself that he hates this. That it’s the last time. That when he says over, he means over in every sense of the word.

However, Jade’s never been as good a liar as Davey is. 

~*~

February 2005

Jade wasn’t always this bad at lying, though. Last year, he believed every piece of bullshit he fed himself. Through and fucking through. 

Last year, when Jade met her, the sky fell down around him so heart-stoppingly fast that he didn’t pause to question whether or not what he was feeling was real, whether he was the one orbiting elsewhere if he’d been driven to this point. It was all consuming so he perceived it to be the truth. He fell so sharply, instantly in love with her that all else ceased to exist or have any importance in his life. He was suddenly with someone he _could_ be with, someone who wasn’t impossible and selfish and insane and brilliant. 

Someone who was just perfect. Jade’s life had been a complicated maze of darkness he stumbled through with Davey before then... Davey who knew too much, understood too much and comprehended the depth of Jade’s scars, saw the otherwise invisible network of obsidian veins that ran through Jade’s deceitfully sane-looking body. He had resigned himself to that darkness, but a year ago she descended down upon it, as golden and bright and circular as the full moon, illuminating him. Casting him in a glow. 

It was easy to be blinded by it, and before Jade could comprehend whether he was standing still or running so hard he was tripping, he was in love with her, that heart-rabbiting kind of love that fills you with head to toe, chest-swelling elation whenever the object of affection is in the room. Or even not in the room. The mere thought of her was absolving, soothed the sting of his sweaters clinging to old barbed-wire snags of his skin, the black-light fillligree Davey knew how to navigate even without a compass. Jade was suddenly so boyish and dumb as he drowned in this moon-glow, his hands shake-sweating and his mind clouded with the smell of her hair, her gum, her lipgloss: so many things sweet and clean and foreign to him. 

She was everything Jade thought he would profane in a past life, the softest of curves and brightest of smiles, youth and normalcy. The things he rejected when he was a kid, when he was her age. And to complete every notion of perfection Jade was drunk on, she _wanted him too_. In spite of all his flaws, his age lines and scars and callouses, she was just as smitten. And if he just kept focused, standing still with his eyes trained on her and blinders on either side, Jade thought he could keep it that way. After all, she said the age lines were nearly invisible, the callouses he should be proud of, and the scars? She never even noticed them. 

After all, Davey was the only person who had ever really _known_ him, and Jade hadn’t seen Davey in weeks. Jade remembered the first time he saw Davey after he’d been swallowed by the moon; it was after a mind-blowingly long stretch of almost a month. They ran into each other startlingly at the grocery store of all the anticlimactic places, one afternoon when it wasn’t raining, but it might as well have been. 

Davey looked like hell, and Jade was probably one solid golden beam of sunlight, blinding him into the corner, backed against a wall of soap, toothpaste, and mouthwash. There was the stilted, awkward exchange of pleasantries at first, the only time in all of Jade’s history in which he could remember Davey seeming afraid of him, held back and curled into himself with his eyes guarded and dark. 

“So, you’ve moved in with her I presume,” Davey asked in a clipped tone, arranging things in his cart like it pained him to have them too close together. His hands seemed impossibly thin and white as they fluttered nervously, skittering white doves battering themselves bloody against the bars of a cage. Jade remembered his heart sinking for the first time in weeks as he watched Davey, second guessing himself for the first time since he met her. Davey’s hair hung long and tangled from a bun, pulled away from his face so he couldn’t hide like Jade sensed he longed to do.

The swelling of insane giddiness in Jade’s chest deflated minimally, but he pushed it away in favor of the moon, all its glossy, perfect, airbrushed craters. He wasn’t in a place for Davey Havok to make him unhappy anymore; this was the whole entire point.

“Yeah, last week. We’re really happy,” Jade said, and the pure, untainted childish honesty in his voice made Davey blink, made his elegant mouth twitch with something shocked and ugly, slanted with hurt. Jade felt a momentary juvenile rush of satisfaction at this tiny tremor in Davey’s face, but it was immediately overshadowed by guilt. 

“Mmm...you’re really quite taken with her, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question, and Davey’s eyes were on his hands as he picked his own cuticles, lips tightened to the flattest of lines, the way someone’s heartbeat looks after they die. 

“She’s wonderful. And given is more like it, she doesn’t _take_ anything,” Jade wasn’t even sure why he was saying these things, why the frantic edge of _proof_ was slanting his words, why his teeth were in it. He swallowed noisily, and Davey’s eyes closed. 

“That’s not for you to say,” he said after awhile, just before a humorless laugh that came out like more of a bark, his head shaking along side it like he wished this didn’t matter. “Well, I hope you’re happy.” And he said it so sincerely, Jade was probably the only one capable of knowing it was a lie. 

A year ago, Jade walked out of the grocery store telling himself that he was closing that chapter. He was shutting the book and sliding it into the bookcase, he was readjusting Davey Havok’s definition in his personal dictionary from _everything_ to _bandmate._ It was over, he’d finally survived that labyrinth of blood, misery, and shadows, and he’d managed to lasso the moon. All of his hard work and sadness had paid off, proving it was _over_ now. It was so much better this way, after all. He was _in love_ with her. 

A year ago, Jade believed all of these lies. But now? He knows he has always been too profane to touch the moon, and maybe he’s not even sure he _wants_ to anymore. 

~*~

June 2006

Sometimes he goes for weeks without seeing Davey, and the only contact they have is sending each other the occasional email about an upcoming press event, or question about the next leg of the tour. Purely professional interaction. Jade tries to not allow himself the sin of restlessness during these periods, tries to will himself to refrain from calling Davey at two am on a Wednesday and finding out if he’s home, if he’s doing anything, if he needs company. 

It’s almost as if Jade is the one whose heart was broken, as if Jade is the one who was left and betrayed and abandoned. As if Jade is the one whose ego took such a damaging blow , and he was hiding behind layers and layers of foundation and eyeshadow pigment and fake lashes and resentment. Jade has to remind himself in these times that he has the upper hand, he’s the one with a home and her. He chose to pull himself from the tar pits and stand upon a pedestal, protected and bathed in the light of the moon. 

It’s difficult, however, when Davey makes him feel like he’s the one crawling around in the muck on bloody, bruised knees trying to stargaze from a gutter choked full of dead roaches. It’s hard when Davey has his throne of ice, his Decemberfuckingunderground with all those loyal subjects who understand his scars just the same way Jade does. 

That’s another thing Jade has to remind himself. _No one_ understands Davey’s scars the way he does. No one. That’s an illusion; Jade would know. 

Just when things get unbearable, and Jade thinks he can’t survive another day waiting for Davey Havok to call, he’s proven an idiot once again and he’ll get a cryptic text, a jumble of misspelled, error-riddled poetry that he knows from years worth of deciphering Davey’s codes means: _come over tonight._

It has to be this way. Jade cannot be the one who asks first, he has to be invited across the threshold, because this somehow makes it less of his fault in his own guilty mind. If Davey asks him, if Davey _needs_ him, then its out of his control. It is just another incident added to his extensive list of times in which he could not resist Davey Havok, could not fucking help himself. Even though she doesn’t know a goddamn thing about any of this, he feels like it’ll hypothetically be easier to explain away than: _I had to. I couldn’t resist him, don’t you know that no one can?, I did it. I asked if I could come over and let him fuck me, I asked to feel like shit again. I wanted it, because I’m that pathetic, that fucked up._

That’s why Jade always waits for it, for Davey to extend his hand and his home for Jade to come sulking back into. Because then no matter how pathetic he _feels_ about returning to that closed, boarded up chapter he swore was _over_ , at least Davey is more pathetic. Davey has to ask for it, Davey has to settle for what bleeding, remaining scraps that Jade will allow him, while Jade stands still. No matter how frantic and desperate Jade gets, no matter how many sleepless nights he endures checking his phone helplessly for anything, reading Davey’s insomnia addled blog entries, no matter how many pictures Jade tortures himself with of Davey and his various new young, attractive fuck buddies...it’s always Davey who cracks. It’s always Davey whose nonsensical cipher poem gets sent Jade’s way, and Jade who gets to remain motionless. 

It’s been close to three weeks, however, and the next leg of the tour is approaching quick. Jade still hasn’t heard a word from Davey, and sometimes he finds himself holding his thumb poised over the send button, sometimes it’s four am and he finds himself only two blocks from that driveway, teeth gritted together and heart sinking so low into his gut he thinks it might fall straight out the bottom of his car into an icy puddle. It’s difficult to stand still for so long so he’s fidgeting helplessly. He hasn’t seen in color in far too long, and the grey is making his head ache. He longs for a world where its too dark to see _anything,_ and he can relearn existence from sense of touch and taste again. 

His frustration grows legs and walks away with him, taking him farther and farther away from clear cut lines, black and white, and the easy simple knowledge of _in love_ and its definition in his personal dictionary. And he honestly considers cracking, which proves that this about so much more than politics or power or control. That it just might be about what Jade needs, what Jade cannot live without. 

It’s in those moments, when Jade’s forehead finds the steering wheel or his phone crashes into the adjacent wall, that he rethinks who is more pathetic, and who is really in control. 

~*~

April 2006

Jade cannot remember a day of his life when he wasn’t in love with Davey Havok.

Jade doesn’t know if anyone whose ever met Davey can remember a day they weren’t in love with him, either. He also doesn’t know if any of those people, himself included, can honestly say that they don’t hate Davey Havok. 

Unlike all of those other people, however, Jade is certain that he’s the only person on earth who can say that he was in love and in hate with the _real_ Dave Marchand, not just the insane, brilliant, life ruining, life saving mess of self destruction and megalomania that everyone else couldn’t tear their eyes off of. He knew Davey, sure, but he also knew _Dave,_ had known Dave since he was a short stupid kid with too much hair and too much ambition, baggy pants and vans and a bleach blonde bowl cut. He knew Dave before he got too schizo, before the Man Who Fell To Earth destroyed the real thing he found there, living a mortal life and so ashamed of his flesh that he couldn’t stand to look at it without cutting it open. 

Jade fell in love with Dave before he became Davey Havok, when they were both just stupid kids with too much hair. When they were young men who placed all their faith in one dream that exploded too big to handle, showering the rest of the world with the heartblood they dangerously bled into it, the shit they willingly drained of themselves and into the dream. Jade remembered that he was fascinated with Davey even then, though, he saw the diamond in the rough, the veins of fool’s gold running through a heap of unfinished coal. 

When they were kids, Jade was _so in love with him_. It was all he knew, all he thought about or understood or tasted bittersweet and unabsolved in the back of this throat. Before he realized it was a mutual death trap, he simply resigned himself to the fact that he was fixated on Davey and his dreams of the future, Davey and his impossible, uncontainable talent exploding out of that too small body. Davey shared his artistic vision, his whole-body _need_ to create and explain his own darkness and combined reverence and abhorrence of nearly everything he thought and felt, of his own corporeal existence. Davey understood without Jade even having to explain it.

They had the same problems, destroyed themselves in the same way. Jade was so completely and wildly in love with him that by that point, he couldn’t even stop the train from hurtling straight off the tracks and into a maze of crushed iron and rail road ties. Then, when he found out that Davey was similarly obsessed and enthralled, a whole new level of madness was opened up. All they did was write and talk and obsess and fuck, this mineshaft caving in and trapping them together, and it’s a miracle they didn’t _eat_ each other. They channeled the black wave of raging energy into art instead of insanity. There’s a fine line, and for awhile, they both walked it. 

By the time Davey fell off, there wasn’t a lot Jade could do to save him. 

Jade supposes he was in love with Davey even before they moved in together and he joined the band. He supposes he was in love with Davey even in high school, before he knew how to recognize love for what it was and instead mistook it for things like envy or fear or even contempt. Some days, if you ask Jade, he might say that he was in love with Davey even well before he knew him, before either of them existed fully yet and were just scraps of pulsing meat in two different wombs. But Jade doesn’t figure himself for the kind of guy that believes shit like that, so that idea only crosses his mind some days, the days he’s romanticized the whole thing into this untouchable sacred ideal of existence that an external force destroyed, stole away from him. 

He knows in a far away, secret crack in himself where the silt of broken and half realized ideas have settled, that this external force doesn’t and never has existed in the real world. Instead Jade created it to explain and rationalize why things didn’t work, why things still aren’t working. This fabricated external force is an excuse for Davey and Jade to be fucked up. An excuse for them to continue existing selfishly, destructively. The external force is a lie to explain why Davey wasn’t stolen away from Jade; Jade stood still and watched while Davey spiraled away from him, and did not lift a finger to stop it. 

When Jade was still a young man and Davey was even younger, Jade didn’t fathom a time when they were too fucked up for it to work. He naively believed that as long as he was in love with Davey, which would inevitably be as long as he breathed in and out, (he’d tried to stop; it hadn’t worked), that this would flourish between them. That was what being in love _meant_ , it meant doing the impossible, defying all odds. 

Jade had been very young, and very stupid. Now Jade is old, and unfortunately still stupid, because if he were smart he wouldn’t be doing this, he wouldn’t be fucking anyone at all. He’d be holding himself at arm’s length, keeping his vast, black infection from tainting those that he loved with this selfish disease, instead of dragging them down into the gutter with him. But Jade is selfish like everyone else; Jade is no better than a mortal, no better than a man. 

None of them are, and if Davey realized that, maybe none of this would ever have happened. But the truth of the matter is that Davey Havok cannot imagine an existence where he is simply human, and that fire he set eventually burned him down. Burnt Jade down in the process, too, and maybe that’s why Jade got sick of the shadows and the maze and instead, stood still for a year and fell in love with artificial light. With the moon. 

Because she makes him happy, and Davey just burns and burns and fucking burns everything down around him until he’s smoldering in a pile of ash wondering why the hell he hasn’t grown wings yet and flown away from this whole awful world, this prison of flesh. Jade knows because he’s felt that, he knows what its like to feel that. He used to be a kid, too. 

Jade wants to shake Davey half the time, scream at him and tell him, _I loved you the way you were. I always did, I always will, stop trying to make something bigger and better than what you can control. Why can’t this be enough? Why can’t what you and I create together be enough? Why do you have to be more than perfect? Why does the whole fucking world need to love you?_

But unfortunately for Jade, he knows that there is a reason why he loves Davey, and its _because_ of this. Because of the schizo, because of the fire. He fell in love with Dave Marchand, sure, but Davey Havok comes with the package and Jade loves the whole thing. Even the fucked up parts of it. (Especially the fucked up parts of it, because those are the parts he sees in his own reflection, the parts that drowned him in the first place, the parts he buried himself in like the head of a hungry tick). If Davey realizes he’s just a human and no matter how hard he tries he always will be stuck in a prison of flesh and blood, he wouldn’t be Davey, and Jade wouldn’t be in love with him. 

Or maybe he would. Maybe there’s nothing either of them can do to change that, and he’ll be stuck in this maze forever, no matter how hard the moon shines, how much he profanes it with his dirty hands. Jade’s no longer a young man, but there’s still not a day he can remember when he wasn’t in love with Davey Havok. 

There’s also not a day he can remember when he doesn’t hate him in some respect, and these are the days he tries to remember, the days he tries to hold near and dear as he bleeds down the backs of his thighs and drives painstakingly to his home, and Sunset Blvd. fades to grey once again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Davey: psycho fucked up dude.

Chapter 2. 

August 2006

The tour is awful. Davey doesn’t acknowledge Jade’s existence offstage unless its to criticize some infinitesimal mistake he made, or to tell him to pick his shit up from where ever it’s strewn on the bus. By the middle of the first week, Jade misses her so much he can’t even function, so much he’s texting her every other second and more homesick on tour than he’s ever been in his life. He feels like a balloon that’s escaped from some child’s tight and grubby fist, drifting sun-ward at such a pace he can feel the heat, but he’s not melting or igniting quite yet. 

She agrees to fly out to Georgia to spend the rest of the dates on the bus with them, and everyone’s okay with this but Davey, of course, who won’t even look at Jade when he announces it. Instead he turns whiter than usual, the corner of his eyes twitching as his hand shoots out across the table and knocks down an entire bottle of Smart Water, which he incidentally storms away from before cleaning up. Jade’s left to the job, seething and self-hating all at once. 

Having her in the bus should make things better, should soothe the unbearable burn of loneliness and gut-twisting, youthful _rejection_ that cripples him every time he’s forced to share a tension-imbrued room with Davey Havok, but it doesn’t. Having her there just makes Jade jumpy and nervous and self-conscious, constantly snatching his sweating hand away from hers every time someone enters the room. He feels scrutinized, judged, and worst of all, _guilty_. He thought it would make him more secure in this limbo if he had physical verification from her that he’s not alone, not as alone as Davey who spends his nights in empty hotel rooms when he’s not at parties with new best friends, alone in crowded rooms. Standing still while things blur into chaos around him. 

The only thing worse than being offstage is being on. Because while Davey is incapable of meeting his gaze when they’re in the bus or at a hotel, onstage he’s sinking to his knees every night, onstage he’s raking his overgrown nails across the sweat-soaked expanse of Jade’s skinny back, he’s picking the most loaded and pain-soaked lyrics to scream inches away from Jade’s face. And of course, Jade can’t do a damn thing about it. He can’t tell him to back the fuck off, he can’t throw a punch, hell, he can’t even drop to his own pathetic, bruised knees and beg Davey to look at him, speak to him, ask for another fuck on the stairs so he can drive home bleeding. 

He can’t do a damn thing but control his breathing and feel the scalding fire of one million pairs of eyes on him as they watch his body shrink under the backbreaking weight of Davey Havok’s screams. 

It comes to a head when she asks him about it, on one of their days off when he’s taken her out to a French Bakery in Louisiana. Of course, he’s not paying attention and misses it the first time, eyes trained on and smoldering holes into his beignet and its pure-looking dust of powdered sugar. _Jade? Are you listening to me?_ is the first thing he hears her say, which proves that no, he was not listening to her. He looks up then, and lies. 

She asks him again, that funny smile on her perfect, glossed lips. He wonders how on earth she can eat something as sticky and powdered as a beignet and not get all that confectioners sugar in her lip gloss. “Davey’s not gay, is he? That’s just a rumor?”

It hits him fiercely in the gut, a sudden intersection of Jade’s two selves, two identities, two _lives_ occurring here, in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Jade swallows thickly, aware of the heat consuming him from the neck up, the frantic prickling of anxiety in his hands, which skitter to his lap like things alive and disconnected from his body. Lab rats running off with their chemical IVs. 

“No, he’s not gay. I think he’s experimented, when he was younger, but all that makeup is just this whole stupid Ziggy Stardust fascination with glam rock and whatever,” he stumbles over it and says it too quick, this explanation sounds foreign on Jade’s tongue, the taste of some exotic poison. He’s used to disclaiming Davey’s sexuality, but in a different way. He’s not used to it coming out bitter or accusatory. Usually Jade lays into the person asking, tells them that it doesn’t matter one bit who Davey fucks. Of course, that was before. That was when it was Jade’s secret too, when _Jade_ was the one who Davey fucked. When Jade loved him more than he hated him. 

“That makes sense...I dunno. I was just wondering, because he...maybe I shouldn’t say,” she grinned wickedly then, childish dimples crimping the moon-smoothness of her cheeks. Jade’s stomach sinks, getting sicker and sicker because he doesn’t have to think hard in order to guess what it is that she shouldn’t say. He knows deep down like he knows his own mother’s name, like he knows the feeling of stage lights warm and blaring on his brow, like he knows that he’ll never hate Davey more than he loves him. 

“What do you think?” He says and forces himself to smile, forces himself to appear as if he’s on the inside of this huge joke she’s telling. There’s lead in his gut however, making him sink lower and lower into the water as the light glimmers far away and fleeting on the surface. 

“I don’t know. I just think he has a crush on you, something. He gets close. I didn’t think it was a big deal...but I watched the show last night and looked for it and I think it’s something more deliberate. He _tries_ to touch you. If I didn’t know better, I’d be jealous,” she smirks again like its a joke, and Jade feels the sidewalk fall out from underneath him, so much sudden overwhelming space between his feet and his beignet and what used to be the earth. Things change and she’s looking at him nervously, now, that sly smile replaced with a wavering guise of uncertainty, her eyes darkening. 

“Jade?” She asks then, and he wonders what he must look like right now to warrant that kind of expression on her newly ashen face. “Are you okay...?I wasn’t...” And her voice sounds impossibly far away, like Jade had suddenly gone deaf at the mention of Davey’s touch. And really, there’s a non-suspicious response to this he knows he should spit out like all the other times he’s been in a position to. He’s supposed to say, _it’s part of the act. it’s no big deal. Davey’s been hanging all over my neck since I joined the band, and it’s just because I’m the only one that lets him_. This big inside joke. Laugh it off. 

Jade’s stuck somewhere under the water though, Jade’s falling through vacant, smoky air where he can’t see his own feet or get a grip, fumbling and panic-stricken and desperate. So Jade doesn’t say what he’s supposed to. He fucks up. 

“Just... you don’t know what you’re talking about,” is what he blathers instead, words floundering like fish on a deck, hooks through their lips. There’s so much anger and fear and upset making him shudder and quake; his hands clench and tighten like all the fury in the world is controlling them, and not his own fucked up mind. Lab rats choking on arsenic and convulsing to their deaths. She gets quiet then, collecting herself and retreating into her small, defensive coil of a body. Neither of them can finish their beignets that morning, and Jade doesn’t stop shaking until dinner. 

She doesn’t talk to him about it for another several days, but after they play Texas and Davey pulls the same shit all over again, she mentions it one last time, this instance devoid of all smiles, because deep down Jade knows that she knows it might not be a big, inside joke. It’s serious and motionless and heavy like a moonless night. 

“He needs to stop,” she says, tugging her gold-silk spun hair off a perfect, narrow, white shoulder, lips pursed tight and serious. There’s a tiny spot of lint clinging to the sleeve of her dress, a dandylion fluff in a pool of black water. Jade knows that this is the only tiny imperfection on all of the moon, and he feels filthy in comparison, a citizen of the gutter. He wishes he could pick off that lint, he wishes he could defend himself from all her razor sharp assumptions, but instead he just bites back his words and swallows it like a handful of pills. Whatever she’s thinking this means, there must be some truth in it, and that’s no one’s fault but Jade’s. His eyes are fixed on the ground as he tells her, “he will. He’ll stop.” 

And then he has to gather his dignity and courage from the floor, feeling like his stomach’s just been split and he has to pile his intestines back into his body cavity, hands slick with gore. He knows he has to pick this up with Davey, and there is nothing worse. 

Davey answers the door with this painful expression of fake-surprise, plucked eyebrows drawn together and twisting his features in that that familiar mask of defense. Jade cringes as he walks inside, guard up and arms crossed defensively over his skinny chest. One wrong move and he could be at Davey’s mercy, one moment of weakness and he’s given in, Davey’s dick up his ass and hand in his mouth and every promise Jade made to himself shattering and joining all the promises he’s broken to her, broken to Davey.

“I’m here to ask you about something,” Jade says curtly and Davey raises an eyebrow, his face looking strange and alien in its flush; Jade recognizes that Davey has only just washed his makeup off. 

“Well, of course. I hardly thought this was a social visit,” Davey’s mouth is smiling then, and Jade can’t tell if it’s cold because he doesn’t give a shit, or if it’s because he’s guarded, too. Jade takes a deep breath and dives in, ignoring the plunging terror in his gut.

“You have to stop touching me onstage. It’s making her uncomfortable,” Jade announces with false bravery, his chin lifted like this is easy for him to do. 

Davey’s eyes light up with something maniacal and fierce like triumph, and Jade’s heart sinks from his trachea to the very bottom of his stomach. “Oh really?! I wonder what that means,” Davey says dangerously, a frenetic and biting edge to his words that makes them barbed, sticking into Jade’s soft spots and drawing blood, snagging like wire. 

“I’m not yours to touch anymore,” Jade says firmly, knowing it’s the wrong thing to say, knowing even _he_ doesn’t believe it. He’s stepping back, he’s easing off the pulpit as Davey Havok fills the whole room, Davey Havok who Dave Marchand created so he could hide behind him and nothing would hurt the twisted heap of flesh inside. 

“Why don’t you tell me that the next time you come over the fucking _second_ I ask you to? Why don’t you tell me that while you’re letting me _fuck you?!_ ” Davey’s voice has climbed to an alarming volume by the end, an angry-beautiful stain of red across his cheeks and his eyes narrowed to slits. His chest is swelling and he’s losing his composure, continuing to yell, “As long as you let me fuck you I get to do whatever the hell I want onstage. It’s part of the show and they’re _expecting_ a show, this is _bigger_ than you and I, Jade, this is about them!” 

Jade stands muted, realizing how motherfucking crazy Davey has gotten within the last year, crazier than Jade had even thought. Davey’s storming to the opposite side of the hotel room, where his suitcase stands in disarray. He digs through it like he’s clawing through sand in the desert seeking water, a starved man. There’s a map of creases running through his face like cracks in the sidewalk and he’s breaking apart. For the first time in weeks, Jade can see _Dave_ , the man he fell in love with, the bruised and wounded and split apart human behind all that fucking ice and glitter and gold. Jade wants to reach out and touch him, feel his fingers come back sticky and warm with blood. 

“Why are you still here?” Dave asks, a wavering note to his voice that tells Jade it’s really him, it’s him and he’s scared. 

“I...I don’t know,” Jade says and it’s the honest answer, but he backs towards the door after that, as Davey tosses silk screened shirt after silk screened shirt out of his suitcase and onto the hotel room floor, where they collect like multi-color snowflakes under a microscope. Jade drifts in the door jamb, feeling like he’s been caught in a blizzard. 

“Leave.” Davey orders. 

Because Jade’s always had a hard time saying no to Davey, he blindly stumbles down the hall, stomach sick and cheeks hot and prickling. He wonders if anything will change tomorrow night when they play their next show, and is shocked to find that Davey listens to him, staying a safe distance away for the duration of the performance. 

It’s only after the fact that Jade realizes that he hasn’t won, and maybe this is what Davey wanted all along. After all, it hurts Jade worse than anything to not have those few seconds to hold onto, where Dave’s down on his knees with the microphone in his teeth, staring up at Jade while all the world watches them. And now, even that it gone. 

~*~

September 2006

Jade has to read the text over and over again before he believes it. After how poorly the last leg of the tour went, Jade’s been trying to accept the fact that his soul consuming friendship- sometimes more than friendship- with Dave Marchand is a thing of the past. That _Dave Marchand_ is a thing of the past, and it’s not Jade’s fault he burnt himself down and started believing he really was Davey Havok. But then this text comes, these three sentences of cryptic poetry from Davey on Thursday afternoon. 

_sometimes i think i can, but then i’ll dream, or forget, or make a mistake. last night i didn’t sleep. you’re welcome to share my insomnia and aid in making another mistake._

Jade’s drinking a bottle of Coke and he chokes on it when his phone vibrates, because somehow deep inside he knows it’s from Davey. He can tell for some reason, and now his stomach is roiling and crawling with carbonation and nerves as he reads the text with shaking hands. He knows what Davey is saying, what he’s asking. 

He knows because sometimes he thinks he can, but then he dreams, or forgets. Sometimes he’ll blindly reach across the divide in his bed expecting to feel the flutter of dark wings and the scrape of stubble along a sharp jaw, and he’ll just feel her: softness and skin, and he’ll snatch his hand away, remembering, making another mistake. Cursing himself. After all, it’s been over a _year_. 

It’s four thirty and he makes up a bullshit excuse to her about needing to go over to Hunter’s apartment so he can help him with this computer program. Normally he’d wait till the evening, but he’s mad with longing and anxiety and confusion that he knows he won’t be able to successfully feign a semblance of normal, so it comes down to a weakly constructed lie, a shrugged on jacket and then the drive he can commit from memory. 

On the way there he counts red lights, pressing his tongue fiercely to the roof of his mouth, thinking all these crazy things about Davey, all these things that he knows about him that no one else does. The bigger and more out of control things got, the more Jade had to share Davey with everyone, and Davey Havok grew into a more intricate persona. It got to the point where even Jade wasn’t sure where the line between reality and God, man and monster, was drawn in Davey’s body. So both of them were inadvertently crossing and bastardizing it, testing the boundaries. 

There were moments, however, when Jade realized with a pang of overwhelming relief that despite the existence of God, despite the schizo, he really did _know_ Davey, truly _knew him_ , when no one else in the whole goddamn world did. Moments when they were in the car and Jawbreaker’s Accident Prone would come on and Davey would skip it with a furrow in his brow, saying, _I can’t listen to this right now_ , and Jade would know why. Moments when they were alone and Davey’s smile would falter over something and he’d admit, for once in his life, _I’m scared of this. I’m scared of a lot of things, actually,_ and without further explanation Jade knew of what. Moments when Jade was inside Davey, over and on top of him while both their mouths fell open and Davey didn’t even realize the sounds he was making, didn’t care about the picture he was painting with his splayed legs and scarlet cheeks and Jade knew that under any other circumstances, Davey would be trying hard to appear as his own perception of beautiful. 

It’s easy to dream, or forget, or make a mistake, but Jade knows that what sets him apart from the rest of the people in the world is that at some point in his life, he knew Davey Havok. 

Everyone else thought they did, especially when they saw the whole of him red and round and dynamic like a pomegranate, spelled out there in the words he wrote, the words they wrote _together_. But Jade was among the select few who’d cracked that toughened exterior to find the hidden whorls of ruby fruit, the delicate details and nuances that were so fragile they broke as he tried to extract them, satining everything they touched. 

Jade didn’t just expose those to the light. He ate each and every fucking one of them, and he was sure of it. Sure that despite the fact winter had come and all of the seeds inside Davey had frozen, Jade had, once upon a time, stained his fingers digging through Davey’s pomegranate. 

He parks several blocks from Davey’s apartment and walks the rest of the way, fearing someone who knows them both would drive by and see his telltale car in the driveway. That person might assume that he and Davey are still friends, which they most certainly aren’t anymore, and the potential of that assumption hurts Jade so deeply he can’t take the risk. 

The door opens easily at Jade’s hand, almost silently scraping through the frame as he steps inside, struck by the familiar smell, the familiar drop in his stomach. Jade knows that maybe they’ve been fucking on and off for the last year, but he hasn’t had one of those moments where he sees inside of Davey with the clarity of someone who knows a person since he left exactly fourteen months, a week, and two days ago. 

He, however, has collapsed in vulnerability too many times to count at Davey Havok’s feet, under Davey Havok’s hand, around Davey Havok’s dick. Jade realizes for the hundredth time that he’s not in charge, he doesn’t have the upper hand, and _he’s_ the one licking his battle wounds and crawling off to the gutter to lie to himself. 

Jade’s the one standing still, while Davey’s pushing past the pain and has remained standing, still.There’s a difference. One comma, but its there. 

He’s counting his losses when Davey comes down the stairs, his eyes tired and pink and puffy like he hasn’t been sleeping or has been crying, an old Apoptygma Bezerk shirt that Jade hasn’t seen him wear in years hanging off his frame in an alarmingly baggy fashion. His voice is hoarse and hollow when he says, “Hi.” 

“Hi,” Jade responds timidly, caught off guard because they usually don’t talk much during these transactions. Davey’s wearing this pair of navy blue plaid pajama pants that Jade’s pulled down his hips countless times, the material worn muslin-thin in so many places, frayed holes at the knees. They stand and regard each other for awhile, Davey barefoot and picking at his cuticles, Jade just waiting for him to say something.

There are a lot of things Jade would expect Davey to say before _this_ , this declaration which goes against all the assumptions Jade’s made about this thing, assumptions that   
Davey Havok has a divine plan, this game of chess where Jade is a pawn and he’s only two moves away from checkmate. But what Davey’s scratchy voice mumbles out is, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.” And then he looks at Jade, eyes blown open like the night sky after a fire, the smokiest, darkest brown. He’s looking at Jade the way he used to look at Jade, like they were just one half regarding its counterpart, no walls or mirrors or curtains. Just _this is me. Please take it as it is._

Jade swallows and says evenly. “Well I guess that makes two of us.” 

Davey smiles weakly, a watery smile followed by a watery laugh that’s all broken and cracked around the edges. Davey Havok is fraying before Jade’s eyes, threads tattered and faded and under all of that, there’s a beating heart stained pomegranate red, and Jade reaches for it. 

They make it to Davey’s bed, and Jade doesn’t remember how to breathe. Or maybe Davey’s not letting him. There’s something raw and terrifying and desperate about Davey’s kisses, the way his mouth is covering Jade’s and sucking the air from his lungs, and way he’s forcing Jade’s hands above his head and is keeping him there, the way he won’t let Jade move. 

There’s teeth behind his kiss, and when he finally lets go of his bruising grip, he only does it to maul Jade’s chest under his shirt, shaping his ribcage like he were made of clay and he could break it if he wanted to, mold it back into something that was his in a past life. A half-dreamed, once-forgotten, often-mistaken life. Jade’s afraid he’s leaving marks, nails in his back and teeth in his neck. Still, he’s in pieces, too blind and thrashing and needy to tell Davey to stop. 

Not that he even wants him to. The knowledge that Davey’s laying claim to his body so blatantly, _marking_ him is so dirtyhotsick that he can’t do anything but say _please_ , beg for it, voice muffled to a weak hiss under Davey’s weight. When Davey fucks him, they actually face each other this time, and Jade can’t see Davey’s eyes, but he knows there’s more than just sweat and spit slicking the junction of his neck and shoulder. Davey comes with a broken moan that’s crushed like a ball of foil, more than a sob, less than a prayer, and Jade follows him silently, legs hooked around his back because he thinks he might not be able to breathe without Davey doing it for him. 

Usually when they fuck, Davey pulls out abruptly and leaves Jade a tangled mess with come on his thighs, but this time is different. They pant in tandem, chests heaving as Davey mouths slow-motion kisses up Jade’s collarbone. Then he rolls off, sliding from Jade with an exhausted shudder. Jade thinks he’s about to get up and leave, shower their combined seed and saliva and sweat from his body so he can go back to being God, but instead he lies there next to Jade gazing up at the ceiling, his left arm still trapped under Jade’s used up body. 

They share the bed in silence, for the first time in over a year, and Jade knows he needs to get home, but can’t make himself move. He can’t stand the idea of Davey’s come seeping out of him and sliding down the backs of his thighs. Still, he forces himself to sit, shifting to the edge of the bed and bending to pull on his boxers and jeans, which form a lonely dark pile on Davey’s otherwise white carpet. 

Jade’s almost finished, he’s almost laced both his shoes and stood up to leave when Davey is suddenly at his back, curling fetal-tight around him like a hungry semi colon, attaching to Jade and shivering. Jade’s breath catches in his throat, the ripped noise behind him unmistakably the sound of Dave Marchand crying. Of Dave Marchand begging. 

“Why can’t you just come back,” he chokes, voice cramped and lost somewhere between his swollen mouth and the skin of Jade’s lower back. It takes every ounce of strength Jade’s ever known to keep himself facing forward, staring at his shoes. He knows this person losing it at his back. He knows what Accident Prone means to him, he knows what he’s afraid of, he knows what he looks like when he’s just come inside of him. 

He wants to touch him more than anything else he can ever fathom wanting. 

“Why can’t you just come back,” Davey repeats. And then, “I can’t do this. I don’t know what I’m doing.” 

Jade stares and stares until his eyes get blearier and his black shoes melt into the white carpet and everything becomes wet and grey like rain. Davey doesn’t let him go for a long time, but when he does, leaving is the hardest thing Jade has ever done, because that’s Dave Marchand curled up in a puddle of his own snot in that bed. Not a king, not a god, not even Davey Havok. Just Dave, and Jade’s still in love with Dave. Jade never stopped. 

Sometimes he dreams things are different, or forgets to hate him, and as Jade stops in Davey’s downstairs bathroom to throw a fist half-heartedly into the granite floor and dry sob pathetically for a few miserable minutes, he realizes with hands stained pomegranate red, that he has made another mistake.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the end.

Chapter 3

May 2005

Jade moves from northern California to Hollywood. After all, every inch of the bay is positively haunted by Davey, and Jade’s never believed in ghosts, nor has he ever been able to stomach being proved wrong. So he runs away; it is what he’s good at. He begins to construct an existence built around something other than _him_ , other than _them_ , their art, because there’s not a single place untainted by Davey’s shadows and blood stains. Telegraph Ave. where they’d hit Rasputins for the unrivaled industrial selection, the vegan truffles at the North Bay, the park in Oakland by the Mills campus where they’d skate and watch the college girls, the ghetto Laundromat whose machines ate their quarters. And then the more personal locations, old wrecking sites Jade would rather have burnt down: the house they shared, the stairwell they’d kissed in, that Indian place by the Sunset District with the grimy bathroom Davey had locked with shaking hands before he bent Jade over the sink and watched his face twist and break in the mirror. 

 

But as Jade’s making the down payment on the apartment, or perusing Ikea’s website for the perfect coffee table, or gazing out of the window at the completely new, untarnished city with its billboards and tan lines and taco trucks, it doesn’t seem to matter how many hundreds of miles away he is. His breath will still catch in his throat as he imagines the sweet, earth-smelling richness of earl grey truffles from the North Bay, the salt air carrying trolley noises and making Davey’s hair curl in the humidity, the perfect, precise, unmatched way the lines of his face look in a frown. Jade wants to, but cannot forget how it feels when Davey presses his lips to the downy place at the back of Jade’s neck, a bit of softness in the dirtiest of places, alleys and closets and restaurant bathrooms. 

He buys a kettle from Crate and Barrel to see if that helps, and it does, for one blissful second, so then he’s back again the next day, buying a lap desk and a surge protector and one of those alarm clocks you can set to monitor the subtle nuances in your nighttime movements so in the morning it’ll tell you how long you were in REM sleep. Each of these things loosens the bitter knot in his brain, the knot made from all the loose ends and shards of broken, hazy memories of the bay. 

But still, underneath everything...underneath his new city and his new kettle and his new alarm clock and his new house and his new dog and his new stereo system with surround sound and even underneath _her_...he still feels an itch, that perpetual pinprick in his heart like a splinter festering out, working its way to the surface. He tries his hardest not to pick at it, knowing that if you let splinters run their course your body will push the intrusion out naturally.

It remains, though, and one night when he’s half-asleep and mostly drugged on melatonin from the green plastic bottle she bought him at Whole Foods, he gives into it and digs his nails in around the surrounding shard of worry. He turns inward and thinks of the bay and the salt and the mirror and sits down in the daze at the computer. 

And before Jade knows it, he’s spent several hours tracking all of Davey Havok’s online activity, and the online picture evidence of his non-online, very much public, very much _social_ activity, as well. In spite of wanting to get as far away from it as possible, here Jade is, sleepy-eyed and short of breath, bathed in the blue glow from the computer screen as he reads Davey’s psychotic-poetic accounts of late night parties spent with names Jade doesn’t recognize. Jade pours over all the photos, Davey with his new ridiculously bleached hair dancing cheek to cheek with boys, girls, and the occasional one Jade can’t fit into either category. Davey with someone else’s cherry red lipstick in tawdry, smeared kiss marks on his jaw. 

Jade is sick over it, heart rabbitting hysterically and cheeks burning as he scrolls through page after page, sloppily hacking into distant acquaintance's photobuckets so he can find more incriminating evidence, pictures of Davey looking increasingly thinner, more tired, and with more and more make up.

And it shouldn’t matter to him to see this. It should be a relief for Jade to know Davey wasn’t mourning the split as one mourns death, curled up like a corpse in a mouse trap held fast by a crippling bar of tin, crushing all his organs into a soup of incapability. 

Davey has a tendency to buckle and snap under the weight of trauma, but these photos show quite the opposite. Not someone struggling to keep his head above water, but someone taking the pain and cooking it in a spoon over a flame, shooting it up and soaring above every mere man who inhabited earth so he could reject their daily inconveniences, sleeping and eating and feeling. Instead of pacifying the splinter’s stinging itch, these photos and blog entries terrify Jade, paint a picture of a new, foreign Davey he doesn’t recognize. 

So of course, sometime after the sun rises ,Jade stumbles back to bed with a pressurized chest and a sinking gut and falls to fitful sleep, only to repeat the pattern again the following night, and perhaps for the next few weeks. It’s a habit he can’t break. Soon the infection around the splinter grows so inflamed and red and oozing, and Davey grows so bony and sharp and bitter and hollow, that Jade’s sure the haunting has grown out of the bay like an unruly fern, clogging all the freeways and creeping with sinister intentions into LA, into his window, and into his throat, choking him. 

And even after he’s crawled from his bed to his computer and back again, still all he can think of is crawling all the way back up the state and into those wrecking sites, those dirty places, his old house, old kisses, the same old hurt he cooks in a spoon over an open flame and shoots up until he nods away. 

 

~*~

June 2006

When Decemberunderground comes out, Jade is forced to be in constant contact with Davey again, and its during this time when he decides that he hates him officially. Every interview is utterly painstaking; he sits staring at his lap where his fists clench and unclench contemplatively, while Davey forgets how to be polite, and doesn’t understand how not to prove himself. His body is literally humming with nervous energy the minute they sit down in front of the microphone, and for the first time Jade is certain it’s not because of him, of their proximity, of the few conscious inches of longing between their thighs.

It’s because Davey Havok has gone insane. And what’s worse, is that Jade doesn’t even care anymore. He hates him. He’s sure everyone hates him. That the more Davey twists the world into loving him, the more everyone in his immediate circle grows to loathe him.

Jade knows for a fact it’s not just him. As he sit and wrings his sweating hands into a knot of fury, he’s aware of Hunter and Adam’s gazes burning similar holes into the ground, their teeth grinding as Davey struggles against every current to prove himself. It’s this mortifying battle to witness, his wings beating helplessly as singed feathers make flurries around him, his desperate pleas to _explain_ what his artistic vision is while simultaneously keeping everything a secret, and preventing infection from creeping into his still open wound. 

It’s the first time Jade feels responsible for this artistic vision without being a part of it, without having an insider’s view. Davey’s made sure to place him on the outside, and this is not why Jade hates him. No. He hates him because he’s gone crazy, because he’s a different person, because he’s schizo, because he’s so wildly arrogant and self loathing at the same time there’s no room for someone like Jade to exist in the margins. 

Jade never accepted he was fucked up the way Davey did. But now, Jade’s trying to change things while Davey’s not just accepting it, he’s _embracing_ it, rolling in it, ingesting it with no regards to moderation. He’s made it the pillar of his new religion, so everyone can worship him for being the incarnate, while Jade’s denying he was ever encased in shadow. Jade’s vaguely aware that they exist on opposite ends of the spectrum, embodying two extremes, where the healthy middle ground exists somewhere between them. 

But because he hates him now, Jade’s unwilling to admit there _is_ anything between them. So instead he hears every word of bullshit Davey spews as interviews without listening to it, he waits for Davey to slip or stumble or reveal too much, so he can latch onto it like a leech and suck the blood out of wherever Davey’s messed up. Because he needs him to mess up. Because Davey believes that he can’t anymore. 

Upon returning to his home one day after an interview, she can tell something’s wrong. Jade’s both pale and flushed with hating Davey, with hating himself for hating Davey because hate itself is too strong an emotion for Davey to warrant. He doesn’t even , _deserve that,_ , he’s too fucking crazy. He tells her this when she asks him, laying her hand on his heaving chest while he won’t meet her eyes and asking: _Jade, what’s wrong?_

“He doesn’t even deserve my _anger_. I don’t even want to be mad at him,” he spits out in jumble. Her brow furrows at the rawness of it, and she smooths a line in his brow out with her thumb. 

“Who?” She says warily. He doesn’t want to say Davey’s name because he doesn’t even deserve _that_ , but he knows somehow that refusing to speak his name gives him even more power, so he closes his eyes, counts to ten, and says evenly: 

“Dave.” 

“Oh?” She doesn’t sound surprised. 

“I hate him,” he childishly responds, and she mothers him because of it, wrapping him up in her arms and backing him against the kitchen counter cooing and murmuring. This is exactly what he wants from her, what he never got from Davey. Davey never made him feel better in this absolving fashion, he only healed Jade by showing him his own wounds. He never lied, _it’s all going to be better._ He only said, _It hurts bad, but I understand. I bleed from the same places._

Jade’s hands form fists at her back, and he rubs his forehead against her shoulder, thinking about how terrible Davey had been for him, how terrible it was that he never lied to him. “He’s gone motherfucking insane.” He mumbled, mouth full of her sweater. 

“Hasn’t he always been crazy? And since when do you hate him? I thought you two were friends. Just going through a rough patch maybe, but friends.” 

Too many questions for Jade to answer right now, so he just chews at the synthetic fibers in her sweater, mouth cottony and bitter as he thinks _we were never friends. We were more, and now we’re less, and how can we ever be anything ever again when he’s not even a human?_

“He’s not even human anymore,” Jade declares, and thinks fleetingly that Davey might like to hear that, so he rephrases it quickly. “He’s a megalomaniac with no regard for anything else but his own fucking self concept. He’s decided he’s the whole band.” _He’s decided he’s the whole world._ Jade wants to add, but he knows that this is giving Davey too much credit and he fears giving her the wrong impression, he doesn’t want her to think that at one point, Davey was _Jade’s_ entire world, and Jade understands how someone could inhabit that much space. r32;  
Because Jade does understand. 

He digs his teeth into the sweater and her fingers comb through the back of his hair, rubbing circles into his scalp. “Well, you’re the whole band to me,” she says gently, reassuringly, in that comforting, lying-mother way. Jade sighs, grateful to her for existing, for shining steadily all night while the rest of the world slept and fucked and collapsed. 

He can muster gratitude for her. He can even love her for holding him like this against the kitchen counter petting him like a dog. He can feel so much for her, but even as she remains perfect and heartbeat-steady in his arms, his body is still consumed by hatred for Davey Havok. 

And Jade knows with a resigned bitterness that he’s not just furious at Davey for going insane, he’s furious as himself for letting Davey...Davey and his schizo, his brilliance, even his unglamorous humanity...letting any of that dictate as strong an emotion at hatred. Because all the gratitude in the world cannot top that, cannot smother that fire. 

Jade stands still in her arms, and thinks about how much he hates Davey. 

 

~*~ 

Then: 

It was 1999, and Jade was twenty five. He was sitting on Davey’s bed, exhausted in this deep, bone-aching way. He was watching Davey, Davey bent over a Sega controller fiddling with the battery compartment, brow creased in such perfect, stoic concentration. His cheeks were still rounded with youth, lips an untrembling, unkissed line. And Jade didn’t, at that moment when he was twenty five, realize he was in love with him yet. 

He did, however, remember a striking wave of calm that washed over him: an utter placidity that made his limbs heavy and muted and drugged and slow-moving. Jade did not know he was in love with him, but he remembered surrendering to that content exhaustion, that simple fact that even if he wanted to, he could not move from the foot of Davey’s bed right now, not even he if tried. He could not tear his eyes away from Davey’s profile. There was music on, something sad and beautiful and they were waiting to play Sega which wasn’t romantic at all, but Jade remembered thinking with utmost certainty and clarity: _I am home now._

Now: 

It is 2006, and Jade is thirty three. In fact, it is the last day of 2006. The Last Day, and Jade is realizing for the First Time that all he has ever done is watch Davey. He knows this. He’s watched Davey since he met him, he’s chewed his lip until he tasted copper countless times with his wide-open eyes stinging with an indescribable hunger to dismantle every level of him, to dig and dig. It’s New Years Eve and Jade is watching Davey again, or at least attempting to. It’s a near impossible feat with the way he’s flitting around, skittering along the edges of Jade’s peripheral vision like a bottle rocket out of control, a bird spiraling with one wing cut. 

Davey is _on_ , like all of Time’s Square glittering and flashing and commodified. It hurts Jade’s eyes to focus on so many lights, so he keeps on looking away, taking his own path backstage and stealing glances at the sun in the tense, impatient hours after soundcheck and before they play. It’s snowing outside and they’re both bundled away in parkas, shivering and orbiting along separate axes. Davey is deliberately ignoring him, instead pouring all his energy into placing sloppy wet kisses on every cheek that wanders within a five foot radius of his humming body, holding his wrist just so and holding his eyelids just so, smokey and at half mast under the weight of his false lashes. A miraculous thing Davey has built, smoke and mirrors and a play with sets and lights and a tech crew manufactured from the exoskeletons of his insecurities.

Jade watches him from under the wing of his hair, where it feels like the gel and dampness from his shower have frozen. He thinks of a lifetime ago, when he stopped merely seeing Dave Marchand, the scrubby skater kid newly in college, and actually began _watching_ Davey Havok, seeing the potential of an artist, glittering fool’s gold under all that cracked and crippling and childish anger. The shine that drew him in like a magpie desperately needing to possess that gold, possess and understand and contribute to that art. Jade needed to do more than just observe Davey’s exterior. He needed to comprehend the complexities of his _interior_. 

When he and Davey were still together, Jade believed that he, and he alone _knew_ Davey. Now, as he watches the broken bottle rocket spark, sputter, and fall like a cheap New Years firework, he thinks with an empty scrape of regret in his throat, that he doesn’t know him at all anymore. 

Davey Havok’s mouth is a straight line of furious self importance, and Jade watches him and tries to see through to the gold beneath, chewing the inside of his lip until he tastes copper, until his eyes water and become a swamp of blurred lights against the New York cold. Jade realizes with a sick roil of nausea that Davey used to be a mess concealing a glint of gold, but the gold has since consumed him and now its his entire life, his entire identity. 

The microphone is gold, the makeup smeared up to Davey’s brow is gold, the tie Jade’s supposed to wear is gold, the ball that’s supposed to drop in t-minus four hours is gold. Jade’s throat is now thick with panic, closing and clenching around an expanding franticness that he must keep digging; he has to keep at it until his nails bleed and he’s more than elbow deep and he finds that soil beneath the frozen layer of gold and earth he buried himself in all those years ago, 1999, twenty five, lost and found. 

 

All of this, the confetti and the snow and the gold leaf and every towering spire in Decemberunderground... Jade thinks that this isn’t what Dave wanted. This isn’t what _they_ wanted, all those years ago when Jade joined the band and they wrote the beginnings of a dream, a floor plan to something small and wet and green and barely sprouting. This isn’t what either of them meant when they said the word great. They didn’t mean New Years Eve and snow and so many cold, drunken upturned faces gazing up at them from the trash-thick, junk-slow veins of New York. They didn’t mean fake eye lashes or middle schoolers buying their records just to throw them out in a few years when they outgrew their pubescent darkness. 

 

As Jade makes himself sick with all the lost ideals they drowned so many years ago, he catches Davey looking back at him. Watching Jade. Smoky, half-lidded, gold-encrusted eyes sweeping the room to rest on him for one silent, loaded moment. The corner of Davey’s mouth twitches into a shamefully raw half-smile when he finds that Jade is looking back, and amongst the chaos of a New York City and a New Year, their eyes meet. And Davey isn’t mocking him. Davey clearly isn’t thinking of breaking him or manipulating him, he isn’t thinking of Jade’s blood on his dick, or being prayed to, or winning this sick game neither of them can quit. 

Davey is just looking back at Jade through wide-open eyes stinging with an indescribable hunger to dismantle every level of him, to dig and dig. 

And Jade feels so fucking cold all of the sudden, because it hits him that he might be wrong. 

Jade stops seeing Davey and actually catches his breath, ceases his panic, and watches him. Watches his interior and all its complexities and hears what he’s been trying to tell Jade all along. 

Davey has not been trying to hide behind the gold and become God. It wasn’t a wall he built, not an arsenal. It was a window, a hallway, a mirror. A mirror scrawled with the lipstick last ditch suicide note: “look at me. Please, Jade, look at me. Look at me and all of me, all that I’ve tried to hide from you all those lifetimes ago because _I was scared too,_. Just like you. I need to be noticed. I need to be understood, and misunderstood, and worshiped. I need to be loved.” 

Jade thinks of Davey curled around his back that time he begged him to stay. 

Jade thinks of Davey’s snowdrifts and worshippers and fuck toys and Decemberunderground, and wonders if when he thought Davey was building this world to push him away, it was actually something that sprung up in the frozen, yawning space Jade left in the wake of running. Maybe all this time, Jade wasn’t standing still. Jade was running, while Davey was standing. Because after all, Jade was gone long before he actually, physically left. There was plenty of vacant land for Davey to begin the new floorplan, to begin building the wall that was not an arsenal, but a window, a hallway, a mirror. 

Jade is very, very still as he watches Davey now, the straight up and down of his spine holding so much wreckage upright, nothing but battered flesh and torn skin and miles and miles of earth run through with fool’s gold. Standing, still, in spite of Jade’s efforts to beat him away and keep him at arm’s distance. Jade watches and swallows the self-loathing sickness in his throat, thinking that on some different day, some years ago, in 1999 when he was twenty five, he wouldn’t have even had to dig beneath the porcelain mask to find Davey’s blood. He wonders now if that is because Davey has built himself so Jade can’t see inside, or if Jade merely forgot how to look. If Jade got tired of working. Tired of his eyes stinging. 

Stinging as they are now, his eyes locked on Davey’s eyes and Davey’s sad half smile, lips parted like the edges of a too-deep wound. For a second Jade wants to, he wants to say fuck it and sprint over to him, place his numb, frozen, shaking thumbs to Davey’s eyelids and smear the gold off and kiss the skin underneath and answer his question with: _I don’t know why I can’t come back. There’s no reason, no fucking reason at all that’s worse than feeling like I’m losing you forever. That I don’t know you anymore. So here I am, because I can’t believe you’re still standing. But I’m here. I’ll show you my wounds, too._

For a second. 

Then: 

In 1999, Jade was sitting at the foot of Davey’s bed, and his eyes swept the room for a moment before they settled at its center, its apex, the core everything was rotating around with the steady, unchanging sureness of the earth’s gravitational pull. Jade watched Davey and thought with a sudden, exhausted peace: _I am home._ And, _I could watch him forever._

Now: 

The last day of 2006, and it’s almost the new Year. Jade finally works his throat around the sinking weight of sorrow, and realizes almost 2,555 days later with the same exhausted peace, _I suppose I was wrong. No one can do anything forever_. And with that, Jade closes his eyes and turns away from God, from Davey Havok, from Dave, knowing with certainty that this time he won’t dream, forget, or make any more mistakes.


End file.
